CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/20/2024

Transgression and transformation in Shanay Jhavari's 'Night Fever'

Featured image, by Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz’s La Manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple) series, is from Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark. Edited by noted Barbican curator Shanay Jhavari, this 424 paperback collects 20 photo portfolios and 21 essays about films made during and about the night. “In the 1980s, Errázuriz photographed sex workers,” Ela Bittencourt writes, “but the women, whose trade was illegal, didn’t want their images shown. She then turned to the siblings Pilar and Evelyn, and so began a four-year collaboration with trans-identifying sex workers in Santiago and the provinces. Working alone at first, she was later joined by journalist Claudia Donoso, who recorded the workers’ testimonies. The resulting book, Adam’s Apple, was censored. Today it serves as a poignant record of a trans community subjected to violence and repression, the vast majority of whom perished from AIDS. Its title references the part of the male anatomy that Errázuriz’s trans subjects often wished to hide. With its biblical ring, it evokes the mysteries of sex, calamity and exhilaration—Edenic scenes portraying perfect bodies of uncanny beauty, tragically marked by fate.”